The people behind your IT.

In the early 2000s Jason was training to be a pilot. The industry fell over after 2001 and that door shut, which is a polite way of saying the plan was gone and the bills were not. So he placed an ad in the East and Bays Courier. It read "PC REPAIR Services – Call Jason", and the number on it was the home phone. He and Amy fixed computers from the spare room and took every job that rang.

What it taught: the flying never happened, but the checklists stayed. Aviation is built on the idea that competence is a procedure you can repeat under pressure, not a talent you either have or you do not. Every process we run on your environment traces back to that.

A few years in came the chance to acquire a small firm called IT Nexus. Belton did not have the capital to fund it outright. We did it anyway. By 2008 the business had its first million-dollar year, a new name, and the spare room had given way to real offices.

What it taught: the name above our door came from the one decision that could have ended us. It is worth remembering that when we tell you the safe option is not the cheap one. We have sat on your side of that calculation, with our own money on it.

Two decades in, we have been inside the workings of more than a thousand businesses. Their systems, their numbers, their arguments at the board table and the thing nobody wanted to put in the minutes. Manufacturers, law firms, medical practices, construction groups, councils. You do not get that education from a vendor certification.

What it taught: the failures rhyme. After enough of them you notice that what takes a company down is almost never the risk it was worrying about, and that the expensive problems are nearly always governance wearing a technical costume. That is why we start with an assessment, and why we will sometimes tell you the answer is not more technology.

Jason has chaired the Penrose Business Association, which is an advocacy body as much as a network: putting the case for local employers to local and central government, in rooms where the other side can simply say no. Alongside that, years of raising money for charity, work with remarkable business owners who were generous with what they knew, and enough travel to see how the same problems get solved very differently in other markets. There have been some genuinely good wins along the way.

What it taught: being right is the easy half. Advocacy teaches you to carry a case in front of people with competing pressures and no obligation to agree, which is the same skill as putting a security budget to a board. We would rather your IT partner had already learned that somewhere other than on your board.

The Microsoft partnership and the cloud years. A 24/7 security operations capability built with global SOC partners rather than pretended at in-house. Expansion into Australia. Today a 40-strong Newmarket practice serving 469 organisations on both sides of the Tasman.

What it taught: build what you can run properly and partner for the rest. Any provider claiming to do all of it in-house is either much larger than it looks or telling you a story. The core has not moved since the spare room: relationships first, structured delivery, and honest advice even when it costs us the sale.